Wee Ginger Dug: Speaking up will stop us being spoken down to

ACCORDING to Mike Russell, the SNP’s Minister for Dealing with David Davis, the Scottish Government only discovered Theresa May is due to trigger Article 50 because they saw it on the BBC. There was no communication via Westminster’s official channels from Westminster to do Holyrood the courtesy of informing them. They got to find it out from the media, just like everyone else. Mike thinks Theresa and Dave forgot to tell the Scottish Government, but they didn’t really. They figured the Scottish Government could find out via the BBC because as far as anything to do with Scottish independence is concerned, the BBC is an official British Government channel of communication. It was only a few days ago that the SNP pressed Theresa in the Commons to tell the country the date for Brexit. Theresa refused to answer, because refusing to answer is the default position for her. Which means that either she didn’t know last week and only made up her mind over the weekend, which points to a woeful lack of preparation and planning for an event that will define the future of the UK for decades to come, or that she knew all along but thought that the people of Scotland and the Scottish Government didn’t deserve the dignity of a reply.

Either way you look at it, it’s an illustration of the contempt in which this Tory Government holds Scotland and its people.

The usual response of Unionists to anyone pointing this out is that it’s the SNP they hold in contempt, not the people of Scotland. Although the Unionists didn’t get told either, or if they did they kept pretty shtum about it. But the bottom line which neither Theresa nor the Unionists in Scotland admit to is that the current Holyrood government does represent the people of Scotland. It was elected. It has a mandate. It was in fact elected by a larger proportion of the voters than the percentage who voted for Theresa May’s Tories.

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The SNP Government may not be perfect, but at least it’s halfway competent. The Tory Government is so incompetent and so lacking in forward planning that it’s entirely possible that they’ll trigger the wrong article by mistake.

They’ve already triggered Article 52, which is the number of times that Gordie Broon has intervened in the independence debate for the very first time. They’ve also triggered Article 61, which is the number of times he’s promised to introduce federalism and then buggered off to sulk in the sour cream aisle of Morrisons in Kirkcaldy after someone pointed out to him that he’s scarcely got the power to change the cat litter tray never mind the British constitution.

Although to be fair, it is entirely possible that Gordie did think he was dealing with the cat litter tray, as just like the British constitution the masters of the household prefer not to notice it even though it smells pretty rank and is clogged full of unmentionables.

Gordie did his latest intervention for the very first time on the same weekend as the SNP party conference was discussing the real way forward for Scotland.

This was a coincidence in the exact same way that it was entirely coincidental that Adam Werritty just happened to find himself in the same places as Liam Fox whenever the Disgraced Minister of State for Adam Werritty happened to be meeting some despot or other. Although apparently Theresa doesn’t like it when you call her that.

Despite the fact that Gordie’s federalism plans have approximately the same chances of coming to fruition as a proposal put to Liam Fox for a workers’ soviet and the overthrow of the bourgeoisie in his Department of Making Trade Deals for Adam, Sky News still saw fit to give considerably more airtime to Gordie’s freeform fantasising as it grudgingly granted to Nicola Sturgeon’s speech to the SNP conference in Aberdeen. Whatever you think of the SNP and Nicola, she’s the First Minister, she has real political power, and she’d just spent the previous week in a very public spat with Theresa which left Theresa with as much egg on her face as you get on Jim Murphy’s shirt.

What Nicola Sturgeon announced has a very real possibility of coming to pass, and she’s got the mandate to make it come to pass.

All Gordie has is an ego and an attachment to reality that makes the Brexit Bunnies of Empire 2.0 seem like hard-headed realists.

Why Sky News thought that Gordie’s fantasies merited more airtime than real-life politics is a subject only they know the answer to, but it’s reasonable to suspect that it’s not unrelated to the fact that ever since Nicola Sturgeon announced that there would be another independence referendum, the coverage on Sky News has made that of the BBC seem like a model of neutrality and lack of bias, but then this is the channel that gave us an opinion poll purporting to show that Theresa May is more popular in Scotland than Nicola Sturgeon.

Sky News decided it was a great idea to broadcast the discussion show The Pledge, which devoted quite some time to the Scottish Question, despite there not a single Scottish voice to be heard. All we got was prejudice and misunderstanding dressed up as comment.

It decided that its viewers really needed to hear the opinions of Stig Abell, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, on the referendum question, despite the fact he was labouring under the misapprehension that Nicola Sturgeon wanted to call an immediate referendum.

You’d think that the basic requirement for a broadcaster would be to call on people who are at the very least familiar with the fundamentals of a topic, but this clearly doesn’t hold true when the topic is Scottish independence.

When the topic is Scottish independence, the opinions and views of anyone who doesn’t support Scottish independence will always be prioritised over those of those of us who do.

It’s not just the Westminster Government that forgets to consult Scotland. The entire British media doesn’t consult Scotland either, and Sky News is the worst offender.

Over the coming two years, Scotland will be spoken at by the British state and its apologists, we’ll be spoken down to.

That makes it all the more vital that those of us who do support independence should not be shy about making our views known to our friends, our families and our colleagues.

We’ll only win this referendum by speaking up and speaking out against the contempt that Westminster and its supporters have for our right to decide.

Ipsoregulated

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